In the largest houses, with the largest gardens, the shortage of skilled gardening labour showed very quickly. A system that had previously demanded such high standards meant that any falling-away was highly visible. The decorative parts of gardens were choked with aggressive perennial weeds from six years of neglect. Moss had spread like a green stain on gravel paths that had once been raked weekly on a Friday afternoon, while shrubs outgrew their space and hedges became unkempt, swiftly shooting up into trees. Tender bedding plants no longer filled the parterres, leaving empty beds to be colonised with weeds. Only the real survivors of the plant world – daffodils and snowdrops, rhubarb, apple trees, bergenias, water irises – continued to flourish year after year. With their boilers cold and pipes furred, the greenhouses were emptied of their dead plants, often leaving only a ‘Black Hamburgh’ grape, its rampant shoots finding their way through the broken panes of the hand-made curved-edged glass. The bothy, where the unmarried gardeners had lived, stood empty or was rented out, while the door of the potting shed hung off its hinges. Inside, the unwanted clay pots lay in their hundreds in rows on the wooden shelving, never to be filled again, while rusting garden tools hung from hooks, no rough hands left to grasp their smooth handles. The hand-made red bricks in the kitchen garden walls crumbled, while algae grew thick in the central pond and the cankered branches of apple trees sloughed their bark. Wanton vandalism often wrecked what decay had not.
At Longford Castle, the Dowager Countess opined:
The flower-garden round the house, lawns, paths and even the gravel in the front and the yard at the back are almost like the rooms you live in; keep them orderly and maintained and they are a pleasure to all, but once they deteriorate they are a depressing burden. As in the house you can reduce them in size, simplify, mechanize, yet it is inevitable that they will remain too big for the owners to do them for themselves. I remember in the war that one hardly noticed the weedy paths between the beds of onions in the rose-garden. After the war it seemed as important to get back good lawns, straight verges and clean gravel as to have flowers again. Lack of order and maintenance can wreck morale both indoors and out.13
That demoralisation was widespread; it took owners of a very particular and unusual stamp not to yield to it.
One garden that had brought in modern machinery during the war to make up for the lack of labour was Levens Hall in Westmorland. But this, predictably, caused a different problem. The head gardener, F. C. King, in answer to an article by G. Copley in The Gardeners’ Chronicle, wrote that his employer now only needed to employ four men, rather than the ten required before the war, if King used new technology to the full:
It would seem to me that I have a tractor which works about four weeks a year, a clipping machine which works five, a sterilizer one, and at least four young gardeners looking for other employment, for I can hardly recommend my employer to retain both them and the machinery. If my experience be duplicated, where does Mr Copley suggest the lads who come back should look for employment, or does he suggest I should get rid of the tools in favour of the lads?14
It was a difficulty, and one all employers had to deal with sooner or later. Most chose the tools.
Ted Humphris and his employer, Mr Cartwright, at Aynhoe Park did not see the end of the army occupation until 1947. The troops left a legacy of concrete emplacements and Nissen huts, although it must be said that the concrete slabs came in useful for laying out a new terrace. Humphris substantially simplified the garden. He mourned the loss of so many fine trees, but managed to get the lawns back in order in a couple of years, grass being such an amenable medium, if mowed frequently. A fierce storm in early 1947 damaged the glasshouses; the peach house was pulled down, its timbers and glass used to repair others and build a new one.
Humphris also began to use machinery. ‘Reluctantly many of the pre-war practices in the kitchen garden had to be abandoned for labour saving reasons. One major change was the use of a motor plough and cultivators instead of spade and rake.’15 But some garden tasks could not be mechanised. ‘The many varied fruit trees trained along the garden walls, which for over a hundred years had provided an abundance of succulent fruit, were torn out of the ground, for no better reason than shortage of labour to attend to their many needs. The war years had certainly hastened the end of the old methods of cultivating and running a garden.’16
As for Ditchley Park, the reign of the Trees did not long survive the war. The couple divorced in 1947, and Nancy married Colonel C. G. Lancaster and moved to Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire. In any event, the times were out of joint. The servants who left by 1942 never came back in the same numbers in 1945, and without them, the very particular charm and attraction of Ditchley Park – grand yet luxuriously comfortable – could not survive. Geoffrey Jellicoe, designer of the Italianate parterre, wrote:
After the war Ronald Tree tried to adapt the house to the new economic conditions, but this was not to be. The final decision to leave England came after he had purchased a splendid set of wrought iron gates and stone pillars for the entrance forecourt and was unable to get a permit for their erection (I remember the costs of the material involved was a few pounds and I remember, too, seeing the stonework lying disconsolately on the ground). After this he sold Ditchley17 and retired to Barbados, where I built him a Palladian mansion out of coral, entrance gates and all.18
Although Ditchley Park has survived and flourished as the home of the Ditchley Foundation, the great west parterre has been grassed over.
In 1951, Nancy Lancaster divorced her second husband and in 1954 moved to Haseley Court in Oxfordshire. She retained the famous ‘chess set’ topiary garden that Mr Shepherd, one of her predecessor’s gardeners, had continued to clip, without payment, all through the war years. In the walled garden, she laid out a charming garden in the Sissinghurst style, with the help of the designer Vernon Russell-Smith. After a fire in the big house, she moved into the converted coach house in its grounds, while still somehow retaining control over the walled garden. When I went to work for her in the summer of 1974, there were only two gardeners: Mr Clayton, the Northumbrian head gardener, and a retired farm worker called Tom Chalk. Mr Clayton thought it his duty to teach me the ‘old ways’, as if I were a journeyman improver from fifty years before, so I caught just a last, fleeting glimpse of the system first established in Georgian times.19
It is possible to argue that post-war exigencies ended once and for all the servitude experienced by both indoor and outdoor staff in great houses. Never again would substantial numbers of gardeners be at the beck and call of capricious mistresses and mean masters, trapped in a severely hierarchical system from which it was difficult to escape, even their homes tied to the job, and so lost if the job was lost. But it is also possible to argue that never again would horticulture reach such a high standard of excellence, and that most of those gardeners took enormous pride in their skills and knowledge and did not often feel that their shackles chafed. There may have been more of the latter at the war’s end, but the system had had its day. All that was left on many estates were the ghosts of aproned gardeners carefully closing wooden doors in garden walls against the rabbits at the end of a long day.
There were precious few high-profile champions for these houses and gardens after the war, with the exception of the National Trust and, to a lesser extent, the Ministry of Works, the forerunner of English Heritage. During the war, the National Trust had accepted into its care a number of very fine houses, most usually left or given because of the financial difficulties of the owners, or their conviction that circumstances were going to be so different after the war that hanging on to these heritage pieces was pointless. Among these gifts were Killerton in Devon, Wallington in Northumberland, West Wycombe Park in Buckinghamshire, Charlecote Park in Warwickshire, Blickling Hall in Norfolk, Polesden Lacey in Surrey and Stourhead in Wiltshire. All had very notable parks or gardens surrounding them.
Even someone who did not know what had happened to e
state gardens during the war could infer from the substantial number of large country houses that were either sold or allowed to become ruinous and/or demolished in the years after 1945 that the situation was critical. In 1974, it was estimated by the organisers of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s first exhibition on the subject, The Destruction of the Country House, that about 250 houses ‘of architectural and historic importance’ had been lost in the thirty years since 1945. In 2011, John Martin Robinson put the number of English country houses demolished between 1945 and 1955 at nearly 1,000.20 Even if not all of those were of particular architectural and historic importance, that still represents a great loss to the country’s cultural heritage.
Of course, Britain was comprehensively bust in 1945, and the socialist government under Clement Attlee’s premiership was mainly uninterested in underwriting the renovation and renewal of large houses belonging to the aristocracy that his party so heartily disliked. The particularly large number of Victorian houses demolished in the 1950s pricked the conscience of thoughtful people like John Betjeman, who could see their historical, cultural and aesthetic value, but it was an architectural style that was comprehensively out of fashion. The Victorian Society was founded in 1958, to champion the cause of many properties in trouble, but by then it was too late for dozens of them.
After a house’s sale or demolition, the pictures, furniture and books might find other careful owners, but the gardens, being so much more changeable and dynamic, could not be preserved, and the memory of most is now only enclosed in leather-bound albums of monochrome photographs, stuck in the basements of county records offices. Even houses that survived, if they changed their use, lost the gardens they once had. For example, Hewell Grange in Worcestershire, which once had immensely elaborate formal gardens, became a borstal in 1946. The gardens are still tended by prisoners at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, but they would be scarcely recognisable to the Windsor-Clive family who owned them before the war.
There were also a number of gardens famous or noteworthy in their own right which were in need of saving. These gardens the National Trust was very reluctant to consider, since suitable capital endowments were unlikely to come with them.
It was thanks in large part to the purposefulness and vision of the RHS President, Lord Aberconway, as well as that of the National Trust luminary, James Lees-Milne, that a dedicated NT and RHS Gardens Committee was brought into being, with the aim of administering and raising money for the maintenance of a small number of the best gardens in England that could be given to the National Trust. In late 1947, Lord Aberconway called a meeting with Lees-Milne, as well as Dr George Taylor of Kew and the King’s brother-in-law, Major David Bowes-Lyon, who was to be Aberconway’s successor as President of the RHS. They proposed setting up a Gardens Fund. James Lees-Milne was of the opinion that ‘There are thousands of English people who love gardens even more than buildings, and would willingly subscribe to such a fund.’21 This initiative was immensely important as a first step towards creating a climate of interest in, and care for, historic gardens.
Lord Aberconway told the Fellows of the RHS at the Society’s annual general meeting in 1948 that ‘only gardens of great beauty, gardens of outstanding design or historic interest would be considered . . . and those having collections of plants or trees of value to the nation either botanically, horticulturally or scientifically’.22 As it happened, there would be far more gardens with those characteristics to save than the money and will to save them.
Nevertheless, Lord Aberconway mobilised the gardening aristocracy as best he could. Vita Sackville-West made a radio broadcast appeal for donations to the newly formed Gardens Fund. She also suggested that the National Trust approach the Queen’s Institute of District Nursing, which raised money to help retired or sick district nurses. Since 1927, this charity had been supported by grand garden owners when they opened their gardens once a year to visitors, under what was called the Gardens of England and Wales Scheme.23 The Queen’s Institute agreed that, from 1949, a share of the proceeds would go to the Gardens Fund, in return for the Trust actively supporting the Scheme. The arrangement has lasted to this day.
In 1948, the National Trust took on its first garden, Hidcote Manor in Gloucestershire, which had been developed thirty years earlier by an American, Lawrence Johnston.24 There was no endowment, and in the early years after opening, the costs far outweighed the visitor receipts. In 1949, the garden might see as few as seven visitors in a day, while the bill for gardeners’ wages was £20 10s. a week.25 By 2011, however, the number of visitors had reached 177,000 a year. Lord Aberconway’s own garden, Bodnant, passed to the National Trust with an endowment in 1949. In 1954, another great garden also came to the Trust: Nymans in Sussex.
Acquired gardens provided many different and complex challenges to the National Trust, in particular how to retain the very personal and specific atmosphere created by a garden owner, whilst taking account of plant growth and change over time, as well as the need to provide appropriate public access.26 But from the point of view of conservation and as a spur to garden historians,27 this burden was crucial.
In 1946, to his credit, Hugh Dalton, the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, established a fund designed to help save important houses or landscape for the nation, as a memorial to those killed in the Second World War. This fund – £50 million a year initially – saved a few grand country houses and, with them, their gardens, but it was cut to £10 million in 1957. The 1950 Report of the Gowers28 Committee on Houses of Outstanding Historic or Architectural Interest, which found that the main reason that the great houses were falling into ruin was the ‘burden of taxation’, emphasised the need to preserve both house and setting if estates were to be given to the nation in lieu of death duties. Nevertheless, no one in 1950 could possibly have predicted the renaissance of so many houses that did survive in private hands, thanks to the courage, drive and optimism of their owners, especially the ‘stately home as public leisure ground’ pioneers like the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Devonshire and the Marquess of Bath.29 Not until the early 1980s was their task eased by a more sympathetic tax regime combined with low inflation.
In 1974, the architectural historian John Harris wrote:
There can be no plea for a continuance of the aristocratic tradition, and there can be no government help for any owner who wishes to live an aristocratic way of life. Fortunately most owners of houses open to the public are hard-working and dedicated to the new life for their houses. We can all participate in this life with a sense of national pride in one of the greatest artistic achievements of western civilization. It is surely of immense consequence that this achievement can give pleasure and happiness to millions, who at will can move from noisy dusty cities to enjoy the country house in its park and estate, that perfect union of art with nature.30
This may seem self-evident now, but it certainly did not in the years after the war.
So much for the big houses and their gardens, but the future of gardening in England no longer lay with them. Harry Roberts, a prescient contributor to a book of essays about England published in 1945, wrote:
In the present century Britain has been engaged in two great wars, conducted on novel lines, with novel weapons; the total effect of which on gardening in this country is bound to be immense. Already one sees a great reduction in the number of large gardens in private hands. The cultivation of flowers except on the smallest scale is discouraged, and large estates all over the country are being split up for building development. After the war, nearly all gardens in private hands will be essentially villa gardens or cottage gardens. We shall then see who among us are real gardeners.31
As it turned out, there were some real gardeners, and with the decline or disappearance of many country estates, it was time for plantsmen to take a more important role in the horticultural life of the nation. These were the owners of village manor houses and old rectories, often bought for a song after the war and filled with furniture bought equally
cheaply at provincial auctions. These houses possessed smaller gardens than those that surrounded stately homes, and the employed help might be only that provided by a steel worker or farm labourer supplementing his wages on a Saturday morning, or a semi-retired professional gardener. The results might possibly be a Sissinghurst; they would never again be a Chatsworth. Nevertheless, they could be very appealing and were to become attractions to visitors in their own right.
Lionel Fortescue, for example, retired from his career as a ‘beak’ at Eton College in 1945, and moved to the West Country, as it had a kinder climate for gardening than Berkshire. The garden he made around The Garden House, Buckland Monachorum, in Devon, was to become one of the brightest jewels of post-war gardening, and is now administered by a charitable trust and regularly open to the public.
Close in age to Fortescue was Sir David Scott, who retired as head of the Consular Service in the Foreign Office in 1947 to live in one wing of Boughton House in Northamptonshire, which he rented from his cousin, the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry. There, with his wife, Dorothy, he made, out of a ‘vast thicket’, an informal tree and shrub garden, which became famous amongst gardeners for the quality and rarity of its plants. This garden was created by two people grieving for the loss of their only child, a son killed in North Africa in 1941. They were one couple amongst many to discover the healing qualities of gardening after the war. In 1970, after Sir David’s wife had died, he married Valerie Finnis, head of the alpine department at the Waterperry School of Horticulture, and one of Miss Havergal’s students there during the war. Together, the Scotts continued to develop one of the most highly regarded plantsman’s gardens of the post-war era, a powerful draw for keen gardeners when it opened twice a year for the National Gardens Scheme.
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